Online name used in HeroMachine environs: PapaKrok, a voodoo name based in my religion of choice…Santeria. I actually practice a hybrid Santeria/Golden Dawn/Chaos Theory/Mormon kind of thingy… officially referred to as The Church of Full Blown Psychosis With Religious Ideations, Not Otherwise Specified.

Real name: Rich Oliver

Real city/state/country: Salt Lake City, UT USA

Real job: CQI Manager at a major correctional institution, Grad Student MBA/MHA. I also write very, very weird books…

Married/single: In a great relationship with a real, live, mentally stable woman. J That’s a lot harder than it sounds. Metaphysically, socks match. Hence the total incongruence of me actually partnering with someone relatively normal…

The best piece of HeroMachine art you’ve created: Not the best, but I have a strange attraction to her.

Favorite all-time geeky movie if any: Donny Darko, The Watchmen

Favorite all-time geeky book if any: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig…not particularly geeky per se, more like quantum-esoteric geeky on a motorcycle. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley fascinated me. Logan’s Run, Soilent Green, and anything by Isaac Asimov.

Favorite all-time comic book character: Doctor Strange. I mean who else has an arch enemy called The Dread Dormamu??

If you could have one super-heroic power in real life, you’d choose: The ability to bend space and time and / or travel between dimensions. This would come in handy for all the crazy complicated quarterly reports I have due about eight minutes from now. Also, I would travel back in time and help myself extract my impacted head from my own posterior, school myself on relationships and personal finance and buy some Marvel stock when it was 90 cents a share…

In your leisure time you like to:Hang out with the seedy underbelly of society and sharing the stale air with unwashed hippies and overly washed hipsters at underground concert venues in cold, cramped warehouses West of the tracks. I also enjoy alcohol.

Character design turn-ons (things you love to see that make for a good design): Details, perspective, personality reflected in the face, cleavage. I like cleavage. And big butts. Think Frank Frezetta and you get the idea. Action poses done properly. Humor. Shock value. Irreverence. Paradigm bending. Atypical use of typical objects….wait, were you asking about my dating practices?

Character design turn-offs (things you hate to see that make for a bad design): Backwards hands, blatant rip offs, overuse of stock faces. WOW-like characters with Tolkien-Lucusesque names like Jar Jar Baggins or Ent Skywalker. Surely an anthropomorphic, armored anteater named Shelby is far superior, right? Especially if it’s from an transdimensional fractal/holographic world called “The Great Beard”. That’s what I’m talkin about…

Best tip for a HeroMachine newbie: Dig in and just have a lot of fun. Don’t sweat the contests. I didn’t post for years until I figured it out and was happy with what I could create. It can be therapeutic if you allow it to be. Make your boss into a screaming, hanging torso with his eye lids stapled open. Depict your ex wife as a blood sucking, manure leech. Use that damn brown-noser in the front row of your College Algebra class as inspiration for a “The Skull F*&^%$ of Cursed Souls” victim…

Any personal message you’d like to share with the HeroMachine community about Geek Life:Geeks are the bards of the universe. We CREATE culture through our willingness the live the mythos BEFORE it becomes cool. Everything begins as an idea before it can be created in material reality. That’s the basis of “magik” in the Crowley Universe. Everything must be dragged kicking and screaming from the primordial ooze and thrown down with a resounding splat into the dense material world before it can actually live and breath. Yep, that means everything you give expression to on HeroMachine springs into fleshy life in a nearby dimension….now where did I put that interdimensional portal padlock…??

Nicely done. Great mix of fact and farce (good enough that I can’t tell which parts are joking/sarcastic), and amazing characters. You seem to have a touch when it comes to the macabre, and it really shows in your art. Congratulations on the profile, and can’t wait to see more of your unique works…

Wow, awesome profile. I love your offbeat, completely different artwork on HeroMachine, and now I think I understand where it comes from. Which seems a little unsettling… But you definitely deserve this.

Great works, theres some stuff on your page you made that are really interesting. It makes me wonder how you did it and if theres anything I can learn to assimilate something in my own way into my style of design. I think its good to never stop growing and learning in my art from whatever or whoever I can. Keep the art coming.

I guess I dont get it, it came up as a small picture for me and it was just random parts. I tried to zoom but it just got all fuzzy. I have my pictures saved somewhere, if you want to check them out let me know. ( I DONT WANT TO POST THE LINK HERE, I WANT TO KEEP THIS SITE CLEAN AND JEFF HAPPY LOL )